Aspects described herein relate to vehicle design, and more specifically, to detecting design problems and determining an operational impact of the design problems on in-service vehicles.
Complex machinery, such as commercial aircraft, occasionally experience equipment faults. Some commercial aircraft and other complex machinery can transmit fault data to one or more computer systems, such as computer systems used by maintenance centers and computer systems operated by the aircraft manufacturer. Current aircraft design methodologies may include impromptu design reviews late in the design process and use engineering “tribunals” to determine the continued airworthiness of an aircraft design in a “post” detailed design setting. The decisions made by these reviews and tribunals may necessitate the rework of some designs, and delay completion of a finalized design. In addition, the follow-on continued airworthiness maintenance program analysis performed by maintenance engineers may be limited in its capability to revise non-optimized designs due to the late nature of the design stage in which this analysis is conducted. Such analysis may result in either design changes made late in the project or unwanted scheduled maintenance passed on to both an aircraft manufacturer and an aircraft operator that continues through the life of the aircraft. The current process may also result in scheduled maintenance tasks that require inspection for which tools and procedures do not presently exist.
For an airline, one major cost of operation is the time and labor required to keep an aircraft fleet in service. Thus, it is important for aircraft to have a design that is maintainable. As an aircraft design is being developed and/or modified, it would be desirable to evaluate the effects of aircraft design changes on maintenance time and labor. Currently available tools, however, lack sufficient flexibility and agility needed to track such parameters from preliminary design to firm configuration. Moreover, a vehicle, such as an aircraft, construction equipment, or an automobile, may periodically be taken out of service for the performance of scheduled maintenance on the apparatus. Maintenance is performed to ensure that all component parts are operating at peak efficiency and with optimal safety. Different maintenance tasks may need to be performed at different intervals than other maintenance tasks. For example, in an automobile, air filters may need to be checked and replaced more frequently than the tires or the timing belt. Therefore, different maintenance tasks are typically scheduled to occur at different intervals.
Engineers use design information and engineering knowledge, judgment, and manual engineering analysis to determine how frequently different maintenance tasks should be scheduled. For example, as part of instructions for continued airworthiness (ICA) requirements, aircraft engineers develop an initial scheduled maintenance program, also known as maintenance review board report (MRBR) or maintenance planning document (MPD). Current practice relies on aircraft engineering judgments and prudence dictates higher conservatism in scheduling frequency of maintenance. Manual engineering analysis is typically performed using data from a limited number of operators to identify the appropriate frequency and scheduling of these maintenance tasks. Subsequent optimization of scheduled maintenance tasks is performed based on scheduled maintenance data gathered by participating operators during regular, out-of-service, scheduled maintenance. In addition, the scheduled maintenance data is not submitted in a consistent format and the submission of the scheduled maintenance data is also voluntary. In other words, subsequent optimization of maintenance tasks is determined based on scheduled maintenance data, which is largely limited to hangar maintenance findings.
Additionally, not all issues can be resolved through regular maintenance, and occasionally problems with occur with in-service vehicles and can interrupt the service. For example, a problem with an aircraft detected during a pre-flight inspection can result in the flight being delayed until the problem can be resolved or cancelled if the problem cannot be resolved in a sufficient period of time. This, in turn, can result in increased cost for the aircraft operator (e.g, an airline), as the aircraft operator may Incur costs for inconveniencing; its customers (e.g., accommodating the customers on another flight, obtaining overnight accommodations for the customers, etc.) and penalty fees e.g., assessed by an airport for cancelling the flight), in addition to the fees for repairing the aircraft.